Optical communication systems are widely used for high capacity data transmission over short and long distances. Currently, simple binary modulation formats, such as on-off keying encoding one bit per symbol, are mostly used (e.g., in 10 Gb/s data transmission systems).
New generations of high capacity optical communication systems are designed to employ advanced modulation formats, such as quadrature amplitude modulation, in combination with polarization multiplexing and coherent detection. This way, a higher capacity data transmission (e.g., 100 Gb/s) and a higher spectral efficiency can be achieved.
For data recovery in coherent optical communication receivers, the characterization of the chromatic dispersion (CD) of the optical receive signal is important. When the chromatic dispersion is characterized, the optical communication receiver can compensate the chromatic dispersion using digital signal processing techniques.
However, there exists no efficient approach for characterizing the chromatic dispersion of an optical receive signal for a variety of different modulation formats, multiplexing schemes and/or detection schemes.
Furthermore, an efficient characterization of the chromatic dispersion in extremely bandlimited systems, such as Nyquist systems with small roll-off factors or faster than Nyquist systems, is challenging.
In F. N. Hauske, Z. Zhang, C. Li, C. Xie, Q. Xiong, “Precise, Robust and Least Complexity CD estimation”, in Proc. OFC, Los Angeles, USA, 2011, Paper JWA32, a chromatic dispersion estimation approach is described. The estimation approach is suitable for non-bandlimited systems.